Geoff West appeared in the "Cities" podcast by Radiolab and helped explain that while the formulas for explaining cities, i.e. scalability, did nothing to help explain the 'essence' of a city. Each city does have unique characteristics, like the average number of footsteps taken or syllables spoken in a standard amount of time, but West says those factors all dependent on the city's population.

I still also like to think cities like NY or Detroit can't be described so easily. :]